Will Sibley join the push for public broadband?

If Lake County is Minnesota's most interesting federal stimulus-financed broadband project under way, then probably Sibley County is the non-stimulus project to watch.

More than 50 elected officials -- county commissioners, city council members, township board supervisors -- gathered in the Arlington Community Center last night to inch ahead a plan to lay fiber optic lines to every home and business in the county plus those in and around neighboring Fairfax in Renville County.

It's an ambitious plan that would require the community to borrow $63 million and then pay off those bonds with revenue from the service. The county-owned operation would offer the usual cable-phone-Internet triple plays, and backers are promising that right out of the gate it would be at a speed of 20 megabits per second, upload and download. That's quite a bit faster than what area residents get now via DSL or cable or wireless.

It's an interesting contrast with Lake County and neighboring Cook County in northeastern Minnesota, and the three of them together offer a fascinating glimpse of where we're at in the world of rural broadband. The northeastern counties both have federal stimulus money. Lake County would own its own system; in Cook County the local electrical co-op would own it.

Lots of people have to take the service for these projects to meet revenue demands. Consultant Doug Dawson told the Sibley County group last night they would need 70 percent of households. The percentage is that high because of the most ambitious and expensive part of the project -- serving all the farms.

It was clearly a frugal bunch sitting around the community center tables Thursday evening. They spent a lot of time scrutinizing how to come up with about $75,000 from the 10 governing bodies involved just to start an information campaign.

But the turnout spoke of the interest across the state in delivering better Internet access to residents. High speed access has become the biggest arrow in economic development officials' quiver these days. The attitude, said Tim Dolan of Sibley County's economic development efforts, is, "If you think you can, you can."

The next month or so will show how much buy-in there is. By the end of February, the 10 governments -- Sibley and Renville counties and the cities of Gaylord, Arlington, Winthrop, Fairfax, Henderson, Gibbon, Green Isle and New Auburn -- will each decide whether they want to create a joint powers board. Not all will have to opt in, but, Winthrop city administrator

Mark Erickson noted that if Sibley County doesn't join, it will be tough to continue to include all the farms in the project.

Two more tests would pop up quickly. Backers would try to survey every home in the potential service area to gauge interest, asking, not for a commitment, but an indication that people wanted to buy the service. If that yielded support, officials would pose a referendum for voters.

Under state law, before a county or municipality can get into the telephone business, 65 percent of voters have to approve. That's a test that Monticello passed a few years ago, but Cook County did not, for example. (That's one reason the local electrical co-op is going to be the owner of the system there.)

So there's a debate in full bloom in Sibley County. Frontier Communications, which provides phone service and DSL to parts of the county, has weighed in to oppose the idea. See similar objections from Frontier and the cable provider in Lake County.

Frontier suggests that the proposed financial model is too optimistic and that it can offer Internet access speeds adequate to people's needs.

The response from backers of the public plan has been that a fiber network would indeed be far faster than DSL speeds. Furthermore, they say, if Frontier or anyone else wants to build and own a county-wide network, they're welcome to and the county will back away.

The next couple months will be an interesting test of the real demand for high-speed access in Minnesota and how a dispersed community like a rural county comes to grips with the question.

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